Friday, January 6, 2012

'Beyond Vietnam' Into Afghanistan and Indefinite Detention of U.S. Citizens

Keeping it Real
By Larry Pinkney
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

"They ask if our own nation wasn't using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today - my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of the hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent."

Everyday ordinary Black, White, Brown, Red, and Yellow people of this nation and world want simply to be accorded the right to live our lives with collective human dignity, justice, economic security, and in peace.

Unfortunately however, the populace of the United States has for too long been the ping-pong ball of an increasingly vicious corporate political system - which perpetuates a manipulated paradigm of insanity - within the death-grip of the Democrat and Republican parties.

Thanks to the signing by U.S. President Barack Obama on (New Year's Eve) December 31, 2011 of the so-called National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA); the year of 2012 has brought about the codification into law of the most heinous act of repression yet against the everyday people of this nation. The NDAA utterly destroys the rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution - shredding to pieces - the Bill of Rights. It is no exaggeration to point out that this law, signed by Barack Obama, has removed even the veneer of 'democracy' in the United States. In his recent article entitled, R.I.P. Bill of Rights 1789 - 2011, author and award-winning journalist Mike Adams poignantly sums it up this way:

" - the Bill of Rights - has come to an end under President Barack Obama. Derived from sacred principles of natural law, the Bill of Rights has come to a sudden and catastrophic end with the President's signing of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a law that grants the U.S. military the "legal" right to conduct secret kidnappings of U.S. citizens, followed by indefinite detention, interrogation, torture and even murder. This is all conducted completely outside the protection of law, with no jury, no trial, no legal representation and not even any requirement that the government produce evidence against the accused. It is a system of outright government tyranny against the American people, and it effectively nullifies the Bill of Rights.........Remember, this was all done by the very President who promised to close Guantanamo Bay and end secret military prisons. Not only did Obama break that campaign promise (as he has done with nearly ALL his campaign promises), he did exactly the opposite and has now subjected all Americans to the possibility of government-sponsored kidnapping, detainment and torture, all under the very system of secret military prisons he claimed he would close!...Even while committing an act of pure treason in signing the bill, the unindicted criminal President Obama issued a signing statement that reads, in part, "Moving forward, my administration will interpret and implement the provisions described below in a manner that best preserves the flexibility on which our safety depends and upholds the values on which this country was founded...Anyone who reads between the lines here realizes the "the flexibility on which our safety depends" means they can interpret the law in any way they want if there is a sufficient amount of fear being created through false flag terror attacks. Astute readers will also notice that Obama's signing statement has no legal binding whatsoever and only refers to Obama's momentary intentions on how he "wishes" to interpret the law. It does not place any limits whatsoever on how a future President might use the law as written."

With the stroke of Barack Obama's presidential pen he and his corporate Democrat and Republican party colleagues have ushered in a state of legalized fascism in this nation under the auspices of the so-called National Defense Authorization Act. Obama's criminal trillion dollar 'bail out' of the Wall Street corporate syndicate of robber barons, and his removal of the universal health care public option from the grasp of everyday people, and his widening and extension of the outrageous and hideous U.S. actions of international kidnapping and torture known as 'Extraordinary Rendition' combined with his wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North Africa, etc. have all made an incomparable mockery of 'democracy' and justice in the United States.

Barack Obama and his Democrat and Republican party accomplices have repeatedly demonstrated that they are nothing more than scheming, unprincipled parasites in service to the corporate plutocracy of this nation.

From the horrors of the Vietnam war of the 1960s and 70s (conducted under Democrat and Republican U.S. presidents) which war Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. so strongly opposed, to the bloody battle fields in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and North Africa today, no U.S. President except Barack Obama [the constitutional lawyer] has so shrewdly and yet so brazenly - attacked and dismantled - the human and political [i.e. constitutional] rights of the people of this nation.

The U.S. corporate-stream media has overwhelmingly and studiously avoided sounding the alarm to and for the people of the United States. This is no coincidence in view of the fact that the corporate-stream media is itself in service to the U.S. corporate oligarchy [i.e. the corporate elite].

There can be no doubt whatsoever that the double-talking, obfuscating Barack Obama and his systemic political colleagues, in service to the corporate elite, have declared active war on the everyday people of this nation and indeed on the ordinary people of the entire world.

The people of the United States are in terrible and very real danger. And the people of this planet and Mother Earth herself are in deepening peril. It is time for uncompromising systemic change to be brought about by and for everyday people.

We must comprehend the utter seriousness of what we face, and act accordingly, in a collective fashion, remembering that every attempt will be made by this corrupt political system's operatives to distort and neutralize [i.e. destroy] people's movements for systemic change.

The time is at hand for the intensification of creative struggle steeped in firm political principles. Organize, agitate, educate - and organize some more!

Onward, then, my sisters and brothers! Onward, while there is yet time!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board Member, Larry Pinkney, is a veteran of the Black Panther Party, the former Minister of Interior of the Republic of New Africa, a former political prisoner and the only American to have successfully self-authored his civil / political rights case to the United Nations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. In connection with his political organizing activities in opposition to voter suppression, etc., Pinkney was interviewed in 1988 on the nationally televised PBS News Hour, formerly known as The MacNeil / Lehrer News Hour. For more about Larry Pinkney see the book, Saying No to Power: Autobiography of a 20th Century Activist and Thinker, by William Mandel [Introduction by Howard Zinn]. (Click here to read excerpts from the book.) Click here to contact Mr. Pinkney.